Don't Just Play Better. Suck Less!

The best a hitter will ever be is during the time she's hitting off a tee. She will be able to hit the ball 100% of the time (hopefully). While this is a good ego booster, it's not how life actually works, and pretty lonely as well. So, when a player makes the progression from tee, to toss, to pitching, she essentially "sucks" more than she did during the previous step. Therefore, if sucking is inevitable, why do we get so hung up about it? Perhaps a good motto to play by is, "Suck Less!"

Baseball/softball is a game dominated by failure, where the best hitters only get a hit once every three at bats. Perfection, and hitting 1.000 is unattainable, and what players actually strive for is just an improvement on their own failure rate (sucking less). In fact, Major League Baseball hitters swing on average 13 times before they get a hit. Therefore, for a .300 batting average the hitter will swing approximately 39 times in 10 at bats to produce 3 hits.  That's a lot of swings for only 3 hits.  This unfortunate fact about baseball/softball life is often hard to accept because we're used to a much higher success rate in school, or at our workplace.  A 30% grade in school is definitely not going to last very long!

Oftentimes, our goal as a hitter is mistaken as the achievement of the most efficient or "perfect" swing in practice.  And in doing so, this search of perfection is brought into the game.  Our goal in actuality is to simply suck less.  Remember, the only thing keeping a .300 hitter from hitting .400 is 4 hits out of 39 swings.  That's 35 times sucking instead of 36!

Now who wants a t-shirt??